Reuters in: Pope invites Muslims to dialogue, slams “holy wars” reports on Benedict’s lecture at the University of Regensburg. Some excerpts follow:

In his lecture, the Pope quoted, among others, the 14th century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos [sic] who wrote that Mohammad had brought things “only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The Pope, who used the terms “jihad” and “holy war” in his lecture, added in his own words: “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul”.

Benedict several times quoted Emperor Manuel’s argument that spreading the faith through violence is unreasonable and that acting without reason — “logos” in the original Greek — was against God’s nature.

…

At an open-air mass earlier in the day, Benedict told about 260,000 faithful that Christians believed in a loving God whose name could not be used to justify hatred and fanaticism…

It’s interesting because Manuel II had real first hand knowledge of the destruction brought about by the Ottomans.

Here’s hoping that Benedict’s lecture and message hit home with the Bush Administration. The god Bush and his friends worship is not God revealed to us through Scripture and Tradition, it is rather the god of war. Hear their constant drumbeat, ‘us against THEM!!!’ Stealing Christian symbols and transforming them into something evil only makes them iconoclasts.

Wikipedia states [emphasis mine]:

Iconoclasm is the destruction of religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives.

That about captures it.